Jonathan Sacks on Creative Minorities

The Tikvah Podcast

Tikvah

Judaism, Politics, Religion & Spirituality, News

4.6 • 620 Ratings

🗓️ 27 October 2017

⏱️ 35 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

From the breakdown of family and faith to rising political partisanship, the resurgence of anti-Semitism, and an emboldened secular dogmatism defining the parameters of the public square, the cultural practices that have for generations nourished the modern West have grown wan and frail. Can they be energized? And what role can the Jewish people play in renewing the vitality on Western civilization?

In October of 2013, Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks, then the Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of Great Britain, delivered a lecture entitled “On Creative Minorities,” in which he argued that as history’s paradigmatic religious minority, the Jews have much to teach people of faith in our increasingly secular world. Judaism’s wisdom, according to Rabbi Sacks, can be vital in planting the seeds that will lead to a renewal of the West.

In 2014, the lecture was published in First Things, and in this podcast, Rabbi Sacks joins Tikvah Executive Director Eric Cohen to revisit this important essay. They explore the distinctive Jewish response to crisis, the promise and peril of religious isolationism, and the ways traditional Jews can help renew the broader culture of which they are a part. Their conversation makes clear that, though the state of the modern West presents many causes for worry, the teachings of the Jewish tradition provides an enduring source of hope.

Musical selections in this podcast are drawn from the Quintet for Clarinet and Strings, op. 31a, composed by Paul Ben-Haim and performed by the ARC Ensemble, as well as Ich Grolle Nicht, by Ron Meixsell and Wahneta Meixsell.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to the TIPPA podcast on Great Jewish Essays and Ideas. I'm your host, Eric Cohen. It's really a pleasure and an honor to be joined today by Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks, who's really one of the most thoughtful Jewish leaders in the world today.
0:24.4	Rabbi Sacks was the chief rabbi of the United Hebrew congregations.
0:29.6	He held positions at many universities, NYU, Ushiva University, and the King's College in London.
0:32.2	And he brings new meaning to the word prolific.
0:39.9	His books, articles, and essays not only brought the riches of the Jewish tradition to a broad audience, but he's also a truly consequential public intellectual, someone who's engaged in particular
0:44.8	in thinking about the great cultural challenges facing the modern West and what the Jewish
0:49.0	tradition might have to contribute to ameliorating them.
0:52.0	Rabbi Sachs, thanks for being here.
0:53.5	Eric, it's great to be with you and great to be part of the conversation and a collection of
1:00.6	conversations. You know, there's a four-word phrase in the Babylonian Talmud in the Treyte de
1:07.2	Barat, page 26, which says, conversation is a form of prayer.
1:13.9	Now, it seems to me that by encountering the human other in genuinely open conversation,
1:21.1	that is the necessary prelude to encountering the divine other.
1:25.6	So I love conversations and kind of think God does likewise,
1:31.7	because the only reason I can really make stick
1:35.3	as to why he chose the Jewish people
1:37.9	is that he loves a good argument.
1:40.6	Well, hopefully we'll have a few good arguments.
1:43.9	Our subject today is this fantastic lecture and an essay that you published a few years ago in first things on creative minorities. And I thought just to get us started, I'd start with the passage that comes toward the end, where you describe in very powerful language, the state of the modern
2:01.8	West. The results lie all around us, you write, the collapse of marriage, the fracturing of the
2:07.7	family, the fraying of the social bond, the partisanship of politics at a time when national interest
2:13.6	demands something larger, the loss of trust in public institutions, the buildup of debt
	...

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